


Home

by JodyBarsch



Category: My So-Called Life
Genre: Breaking Up & Making Up, Claire Danes - Freeform, F/M, First Love, Jared Leto - Freeform, Reunions, Ten Years Later, Trying again
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-12-09
Packaged: 2018-04-16 08:10:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4617951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JodyBarsch/pseuds/JodyBarsch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mini story. Jordan and Angela meet again. What is the connection between two people who, for very different reasons, cannot name, cannot nurture, sustain or maintain said connection, but who feel it all the same? [An exploration of a different future for JC than my MSCL Vignettes (mostly posted @ ff.net).] Occasional M language and content.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The club is crowded as she pushes through; her feet have been stepped on twice, there's been beer, or something equally sticky, spilt on her, and she's been elbowed, jostled and bumped into ever since arriving. When the hand first grips her wrist she cannot differentiate it from anything other than the norm of a busy downtown club on a Saturday night, but the fingers tighten and she's being yanked and pulled through the crowd to what looks like the bathroom. It happens too abruptly for her to process or to know what to make of it.  _Is this a friend? Should she be alarmed? Has someone mistaken her for someone else?_  Angela tries to yank loose but has no success and then they're free and clear of the crowd in the long dim corridor to the back offices, supply closest and restrooms, and she's yanked closer and then his hand's at her face, angling her jaw upwards, grasping her hair, and she sees him in the split second it takes before his lips are at hers, powerful and crushing. So determined is he in this kiss there is little fighting it back; his tongue finds hers, the force of his teeth in his kiss push against her lips as he presses himself against her. Angela cannot breathe. She pushes him off and he lets it happen.

And there he is. Faded old tee, long wavy hair several inches past his shoulder, scruffy face, intense, furrowed brow above those unmistakable blue eyes. And more recognizable than anything, that fiendish smile of youth. Taunting and inviting. Self-satisfaction. Jordan shifts his weight and hitches his jeans at his waist. "Hey Angela." Bluntly Angela wipes her lips with the back of her hand. "I thought that was you." Ever wry. Ever gloating. Ever flirting.

" _Seriously_?"

"Whut?"

Angela starts to walk away. "Are you  _serious_?" she demands with ferocious incredulity.

Jordan, light on his feet shifts easily and blocks her path. "What?" She hates that innocent twinkle of his.

She stares him down dully, " _What_  are you doing here?"

He answers easily, "We're playing here tomorrow night. Checking it out."

"Great; go do that." She starts to move past him again, but again he's faster than she and he blocks her path.

"What the fuck are you wearing?" He's asked this rather pleasantly, as only he is able. In fact her top is expensive. It is white silk and in the plunging peter pan collared, puff sleeved, roomy straight-cut cropped jacket she is polished and chic, but he has never seen her that way. Her glare is rigid. "Sorry. Sorry," he backtracks. "Didn't mean it. Just," he scoffs, "ya got enough fabric?" That's something she certainly hasn't missed. That unfiltered bluntness. He'll say anything, regardless of whether you want to hear it, and never say what you're waiting to hear. Or mean it in the way it's meant to be meant. "Why're you so covered up? You look like you're 60 in the 1892."

"Thanks."

"Well," he gestures, biting his lip, "you're still fucking hot."

"Oh good." This time she does make it past him. " _Un_ -believable."

Jordan turns to watch her; he jerks his head, "Hey!"

Angela doesn't want to, but she does. She turns back. He holds her gaze awhile before he speaks. He's enjoying the view of her again and milking the fact he's got her attention despite the fact she did not want to give it. He cracks a smile, "Go out with me." The smile is not that teasing swarthy one he's usually so quick with, it's boyish, and hopeful, and it's made more so by his eyes. Big. And blue. Angela melts fractionally.

"I can't."

"Yeah? How come?" She makes a face. She sighs, her posture changes. She's feeling and thinking so many different things at once. But in the end frustration wins out.  _He knows why not._

 _"Because."_ Jordan doesn't react, and she takes a step forward for longer lasting impact, "Because every time I see you you treat me like shit."

"You haven't seen me for two years."

"That's exactly the point."

He smiles, "I don't follow."

"Anything stick in your memory about the last time I saw you?"

"I made you come three times. Once harder than you've ever come before." He points at her friendlily, " _You're_  words." He isn't playing games, this  _is_ what he remembers; he isn't throwing it in her face to shame her or to praise himself, he knows this to be true.

" _Jordan_ ," she demands his attention, "you were supposed to—" but she stops herself from dredging up old shit. It'll only make it seem like she still cares, and she is long past that. "But instead you just disappeared. For two years.  _And_ ," she pauses with arched eyebrow, waiting for him to really and truly listen, "it wasn't even all that big a surprise."

He doesn't have a response to any of that, he responds to what is on his mind: "I think about you. A lot."

"Don't bother."

" _That's_ mean," he observes.

" _Jordan_ , it's over. We're done. We've been done for years. It's been so long I can't even remember back to when it wasn't over."

"You got it wrong Angela. We're never done." He isn't flirting, he isn't seducing, he isn't messing with her, he's talking. "I changed your body in a way nobody else ever has, or can, or will again. And you changed me. You belong to me and I am always fucking going to be tied to you."

Angela's eyes roll. "That's sick. Stop fetishsizing 'firsts.'"

"That's  _life_ ; that's human, what's it, inter-fucking-connectedness.  _Com'on_." And that look comes across his face, and he's backing her against the wall just with the sheer power of his eyes, and his taunting challenging lips and the anticipated feel of the weight of his body. He feels just from the shape of the distance between them her back shift from arched to slack and he knows her resolve will soon follow suit. No one excites him like Angela Chase. He can walk away from her for years, he can sleep with a hundred different women, it's still there; every time he comes back to her. And he never plans it. He thinks about it, about looking her up, about showing up at her doorway or her workplace or outside her family's home like he did way back when. But he never does that. But still somehow he finds her. In strange places and in strange ways. He doesn't stop to think about what it means.

He had tried to be Angela's. Exclusively. Fully. In a have real conversations, buying groceries together, listening to the other person's music kind of way. They'd tried it several times in fact. In high school and while she was away at school. And even after that. It never stuck. But still he felt she was undeniably his. Not to claim or misuse, or take for granted, but to come back to. Angela Chase was his to come to. His to love, even if it only felt like love to him. Long ago he'd stopped wondering why. Stopped thinking  _Why her_?  _Why this girl_? In truth she's not all that different from other girls, not as much as he tells himself. It's not the virgin thing. It's not the naïve thing. It's not the nostalgia, it's the not the drama or the unfinished thing of it. It's not a million of the things about her. It's just  _her_. And maybe he goes months without ever thinking her name, but then out of nowhere it'll be her he's kissing instead of who he's with, her body beneath his hands, her legs wrapped around him, her short heavy breath on his neck, and the wanting starts again.

This feeling that she is his is not ownership, and is not exactly entitlement; what it is is a shorthand intimacy, which is why he feels justified in mauling her before a hello. In expecting to sleep with her before dinner, before a conversation. Nothing like Angela Chase feels so much like home to him. Which is why he can walk away, neglect it, forget it, and come back and still expect to have a place.

He doesn't begrudge her lovers. He doesn't begrudge her boyfriends and relationships, but the space of her and him is so large in his mind that he cannot practically conceive that she'd ever not really have room for him. More than that, he likes her so much, he likes  _them_ so much, the fact that he expects this of her, this instant willingness to take him back into her life, into her bed, into her arms, for however long as he is asking, does nothing to diminish her and her resolve and staunch womanhood in his mind.

His view of her remains unsullied and that, if anything, is what gets him back in. Angela does not rely on Jordan. She does not count on him. Nor no one should. Save for Tino. But she cannot help but love to see herself through his eyes, his unflinching, crystal eyes, so soft and pure in a moment and the next wicked and inviting and seductively selfish, sometimes even cruel, but they see her, in the best light, even when she does not deserve it. And through their years together she has not always played the saint or the martyr; there have been things that she has said, and done, and wrongly felt, and Jordan lets that be and leaves his vision of her generously unaltered.

And so, down the rabbit hole she falls, and the adult, adjusted, responsible, mindful Angela Chase forgets every version of herself but his.


	2. Chapter 2

Angela lies there, beside him in his bed, watching him sleep, her head propped up and resting in her palm… His chest rises and falls as he slumbers, so absolutely asleep, gone to this world. Not long before he'd been so alive and ravenous, insatiable in his desire. In a passion that could not be quenched he would not let her go once he had her behind the door to his place. His grip was firm — reaching back to her through the years that have passed them by — but his touch was soft. And attentive. Heat coursed through his skin, radiating from his lips and shooting through her body. He would not be denied, or slowed, or hindered. But she was so lost in him by then she could not have thought to defer him. Jordan held her, carried her to his bedroom and ravaged her, for his pleasure and hers, never making space for a single word. He knows her. Knows her mind, her body, her heart. He knows she keeps him some small place deep inside her, somewhere no one else will know how to get to to push him out; they don't need words, him and Angela. Silence is where they thrive. The look of an eye, the arc of a neck, the brush of a hand and the arching of a back; it says it all.

And still it wasn't silence between them, breathing never sounded that loud, that deep, that desperate for air and respite, and more. More.  _More_ —

He'd had her behind his door, pinned there beneath his kiss, his hands revisiting her, this body, this body he can't forget because it belongs to the girl he can't get over. He thought himself in danger of losing his mind with her, but he did not. He was very much in control of his faculties, using every one of them to seduce her, and frustrate her, and satisfy. Satiating his own passion came to him through the attending to hers. His hands and lips found her in familiar places in new ways and there was no containing it. The wanting of the other person was immense, a thing not to be demurred.

Satisfaction came to them in a heated explosion of everything in them that had been dormantly waiting, and longing, and denying, and making do with failed facsimiles of the other.  _This_  is what had been silently, surreptitiously building up in the distance they'd created and sustained from one another. But face to face it was not sustainable. That distance, that divide — it was an illusion, a hoax, and a diversion. In each other's grips once again it was so clear: He'd never left her. She'd never forgotten him. In each other's presence the chasm between them closes as if it'd never been; the wall she'd built, brick by brick, around her heart disintegrates to dust.  _Pretense._  It was all self-preservational pretense and posturing.  _How could she_ not _love him? How could he have ever walked away?_ It was in her, and in her arms, he found again what he'd been missing, and he accepted it, took her into himself, though she'd never meant to offer it. Never meant to be there with him again. But it happened. In spite of all that she'd told herself for years. Because he touched her and it was like she'd been deprogrammed. He touched her and it was like so much of it had never happened; it was like it was when it was good. It was like it how it always is when it's only them two and the complete and busy expanse of the world and it's expectations and societal marks of acceptable progress in life are shut out and kept at bay. It was like— it was like it  _had_  to happen. Because that's how it always feels with them, in the beginning.

And that's where the trouble lies.

Lying beside him in a ruined bed, Angela breathes, the adrenaline still coursing faintly through her, watching him, letting her mind wander.  _Jordan._ She blinks, and slips her hand on his naked hip.  _Jordan Catalano. Her first love. Her first heartbreak._ And so many things in between.  _Is this love?_  He hadn't let her turn him away when she'd tried. And in the moment even as she'd pushed him off she'd wanted him to push back. And he had.  _Is that love?_  She doesn't know where to begin the disentangling of passion, and nostalgia, and transference, and longing, and loneliness, and aging, from whatever it is that love is meant to be.

She can't think in terms of love at all now. Not now when she's feeling this satisfied, and he's there lying inches away, undressed and utterly, willingly, achingly at her disposal. She can't think 'love' while he's there beside her, promising more of whatever it was that just consumed them like a maelstrom, because of course, there with him — and those eyes, and that face, and those old friendly hands — she'd have to answer  _yes._  There never is an alternative when it's put to her like that. But the truth is, there  _is_ an alternative. Many. There's a life, and a world beyond Jordan Catalano. Beyond his moody taciturn ways, beyond the image of the car and the guitar and the careless cigarette. There's a life beyond the lean, and the touch, and the kiss, and the voice, and the batting eyes. There's even a world in which all that's rendered silly, and an act. Or, rather, a cover. Covering a not-so-secret secret that he doesn't have much more to offer than a smolder, a few laughs, and a contagiously reckless outlook. She can see it that way when she's away from him, keeping her distance, seeing every part of their story with equal clarity, but, when he's around, staring down at her, breathing in her hair, tracing the length of her arm with his fingertip, so much of who and what they are and have done to each other hazes over, and slips into a foggy midway, and being with him seems so possible. The life she could have with him is so near, it hangs heavy in the air above their sweaty heads. It's palpable. But she does not forget it could all be just a distractor. It could all be for naught. Again. He could, he could disappear. And — she bites her lip — if he stayed, they could, like every other time they've ever tried, just, not fit.

Again she looks at him: now spent, he lies there on his side, his back to her, head pillowed by his muscled arm. This is not where she'd seen her night going. This is not how she'd set her life to go. _Jordan… Fucking, Jordan. He just keeps letting himself back in._

He breathes in deeply but he does not stir, and quietly, deftly, she climbs out of his bed, pulls on her underwear, and tiptoes across the room, pulling on a plaid shirt of his, long enough just barely to cover the tops of her slender legs. Angela listens at the door, hoping most to avoid encounters with any roommate who may be on the other side. But when assured it's only the stillness of the night that's in her ears, Angela twists the handle and pulls the door open wide enough for her to slip through.

The place is what she'd expect. Messy but not dirty. Not at all concerned with itself or its appearance. Filled with instruments and music equipment. Threadbare and under furnished, sparse and twenty-something bachelory. It's enough to live in. Enough for Jordan and his roommates; enough for three guys to live in, make music in, and bring girls back to. Angela thinks of all the girls Jordan must have brought up there, but the thought does not disturb her. She's only mildly curious as to who they were, how they met, what it was he liked in them. She drops the thought like a fallen leaf and moves on, stepping into the kitchenette, looking for what she does not know. Suddenly she remembers the first time he came to her at night: in her darkened kitchen speaking in soft whispers so as not to wake her parents where they lay above their heads. It seems so long ago. So long ago and far away, both in time and emotion. Some memories with him still feel so alive and recent — at least the memory of the feeling of being in the moment — sometimes her heart feels as if it's stopped, swelled and frozen with the sense memory of him, but truthfully, it all was so long ago.

Angela fills herself a cup of water and sits in the windowsill in the front room, sipping the cool water as she looks out into the night, and into the darkened alley.

" _Hey,_ " he whispers softly. Angela looks up. She hadn't heard him approach. He's across the room, barely dressed, standing in the darkness, waiting for her to come back to bed with him. But she does not move.

Jordan advances. Right in front of her, his soft pale eyes look down at her, "Watch'ya doin'?"

Angela only smiles faintly and shakes her head.  _Nothing..._

"You cool?" he asks her, not quite adjusted to the sight of her so undressed, and in his apartment. She'd been so far away, for so long, and now there she is. In his shirt. And looking soft, and inviting, and mysterious, and disturbingly beautiful, there among album cases and cigarette butts and a half-dying house plant some misguided girl had once given to Shane.

In the street light from the window she looks so much like herself — quiet, and thoughtful, and softly, girlishly pretty — it is hard not to want to be closer to her. Slowly he pushes the unbuttoned shirt open from the collar, and he looks at her. He looks at her, in that same way he seems always to. In that way she couldn't understand except that it's how she sees him too — when she gets past everything else that's forever piled up between them — like it's the first time. Jordan never looks at her like he's seen her; he looks at her like he's  _seeing_  her. Like he's alive with her, right in their moment, and like he's never going to be the kind of person who'll decide for her who she is. At least— that's how it always starts. A look of... It's something more than admiration; it's a look that says to her: ' _I know you; and I'll know every part of you there is you'll let me; and, I'll keep you.'_

But if that's how it begins between them, something must change, at some point; slight and undetectable as it may be. Otherwise,  _how could he leave?_

_And, isn't that what happens?_ He  _leaves?_

_... Or... could it be... she does?_

No.

...  _Right?_

But either way, this is now. They're at the beginning, again, and he's looking at her like he hasn't seen her in years, like he hadn't just marauded her, and handled every part of her. His cool blue eyes fall on her like she's new, yet, so familiar — so something that had been missed. It's hard to breathe under such a gaze; being seen this well — without distractions, without illusions, but fully — bears down on her, a thing she can feel, and breath becomes short as her body constricts in expectation. With another slight touch Jordan's pushed the shirt from her shoulders, letting the soft flannel fall, and tumble, and pile about her wrists. She's nearly naked there before him, save for the thin fabric of her panties. She's seen, but unexposed. Held so warmly in those generous crystal eyes.  _Jordan._

He's beautiful to her in the darkness. Handsome as ever, if wicked in intention and rugged in appearance. He's much the same as when last she saw him, more defined in muscles perhaps, hair longer and more unkempt, but, the same. The funny thing is, had she never known him, had she only seen him in a bar, encountered him in a club, she never would have entertained the thought of going to bed with him. He's not her type. He's both too good looking and too much the rogue; in her adult life such things no longer have a draw on her. Were it not  _him —_ her first love, her youthful passion  _—_  he would have no pull on her. But it _is_  him. And he's as tied to her as anything. Who she is — what she's grown up to, what she's grown up from — it all comes back, in one way or another, to the years she spent with him. The years spent in the passenger side of that old red convertible, and standing on the sidelines of endless band rehearsals and minor gigs at inconsequential rock shows and local Thursday club nights, and pulling him, and being pulled by him, into dark and intimate corners, they never fully faded into history, and had formed the shape of her heart, and in some ways her life. He's not so easy to leave in the past.

He edges closer by a fraction, moving his right thigh just between the ends of her knees, subtly parting them open. Without the appearance of spreading her knees imperceptibly further apart, Jordan moves in nearer, so close that his leg, firm and solid, stands there between her own bare legs, touching her closely, touching her so she feels it immensely. The vague dull wanting. The aching that distracts and calls and … And…

He knows what he's doing. Jordan holds his hand out to her, slowly running his thumb down the lines of her face, down her nose to her jaw, lingering there at the parting of her lips, hitching at the edge of her teeth, where with fluttering eyelids she bites down, her tongue just brushing at his skin. His hands find her knees. Rubbing and gripping, he effortlessly pushes open her thin shapely thighs ever wider, so that he's there entirely between them, building the frustrating, mounting anticipation, forcing upon her the keen awareness of her desire. Her legs could not close together now should she want them to. But she does not want to. In this moment she wants so many things, but none of those is to shut him out. Jordan touches her breast, still slight, but with the heft now of womanhood; she is all herself, nothing excess, every bit of her body vital. And alive and electrified with current. He cannot withhold much longer, self denial was never a strong suit.

Angela lays her hand on his chest. She wants to feel him, there beneath her touch, strong and lethal — at least to her — but more she wants to feel his heart beat. She needs to know that he's feeling something. That this means  _something_  to him.  _But really what would that prove?_  A heart beats no differently from desire or love. Adrenaline is the same: danger, conquest, passion. But the way his eyes are fixed on her right now, not on her lips or on her breasts, but on  _her,_ tells her everything for that moment.

Her hand trails down his torso, to the edge of his elastic waistband, and there her fingers traverse the only boundary keeping him from her. He waits no longer to kiss her. And the kisses are long and wet and deep. But there is a wanting that will not be quelled by a kiss. And roommate or no, suddenly Jordan's bedroom is miles away — much too far to wait for — and satisfaction must be reached. Small articles of clothing are pulled at and tugged at and drop to the floor, like stray flakes of confetti, and there they are with one another: not long to stay two.


	3. Chapter 3

Fresh from the shower, he reenters his room in his snug-fitting grey jersey boxers, surprised to find her already up and fully dressed. It is early for him to be up and showered, but he woke up beside her, his legs tangled in with hers, and nothing in him would fall back asleep. He'd watched her a little, lied flat on his back and listened to the soft fluctuation of her breath, and when the clock on his phone hit seven, he threw back the sheets and walked himself to his shared bathroom for a quick shower.

She's gathering her shoes when he returns; he's pulling back his long wet hair into a knot at the back of his neck, watching her. He doesn't like how polished she looks. It's too early for that. Sunday mornings after a night like they had shouldn't start with one party halfway out the door looking as sharp as she does. Her well-cut angled bob's settled easily back into place, the eye makeup she slept in with just two quick swipes under her eyes has taken on a chic smoky look, her slim jeans transitioned perfectly to daytime and her white cropped jacket survived the night without a wrinkle. If not for the heels instead of flats, there'd be nothing telltale about her as a woman who never saw her own bed the night before. She looks like a person on her way to a meeting, or to a brunch; you'd never know he'd thrown her up against his bedroom wall last night. Jordan hates how good she looks. He hates how easily she appears to be able to erase him from her life. He had her breathing so deeply, gasping his name, clenching herself around him, and now he's a mistake walked away from, a history closed tightly within a book. That's all he's been rendered in this morning light. But his sheets still smell of her, and his head's still full of her, and he's not letting her off this soon.

As ever, he doesn't know what he wants – in the larger, grander sense – but he wants more of last night. More of Angela Chase in his bed and in his hands, and he's watching her now step into her shoes. "What're you doing?'

At the sound of his voice Angela looks up. She smiles, but it's a benign thing, it isn't something that's meant to stir him, or especially encourage him – it's a mild breaking away, a cordial self-excusal. "I have to get going." She's being polite, and she's being pleasant. He can't stand when she's pleasant with him; he wants her to be real. He wants her to be  _her_ , the her he knew for years; Angela Chase has been many things to him since first he met her her second year in high school, but pleasant was never one of them. He wants  _her_ – not for her to disappear into some polite shell of herself, and not for her to disappear through his door. He's going to make her stay.

Jordan shakes his head. "Naw, you don't."

She smirks pleasantly. "Not everyone's days start after noon." He doesn't mention to her that it's Sunday, or that he was up before her, or anything else he might; he knows how she likes to be right.

But she watches as his brows rise brazenly at her, amused with her as ever. "That you being mean?"

Angela steps into her second shoe, and breezily flips her hair into place, "Why would I be being mean?"

"Be-cause," he lays it out for her slowly, that same old glint in his eye, "you're all, weirded out, 'bout last night. An' last night again. An'—"

"All r _i_ ght," she stops him; Angela's not one to blush, but she doesn't need to stand there before him to hear him recount the last hours they've spent together. It's easy enough to get lost with him in passion and sink into the moment, but in the light of day she's trying to keep her head above water. She knows very well what they did together and to one another, but there's a lot more history behind them than one heady night, and she'll have learned nothing since age fifteen if she allows him now to negate it all with rousing details of one anomalous night.

Still with no encouragement, and noticeably disproportionately clothed, he isn't bashful about the way he looks her over, hungrily, and knowing. "You know," he tells her, not breaking the lock his gaze's got on her, "you're not as shy as you make yourself out to be."

"Stop it." The way his eyes hold her lit her afire last night, but it's too much now; she wants to get out of that apartment, out of his bedroom, and out of the firing range of those piercing blue eyes and the heat they're generating. She looks away, swallowing any smile he has the power to evoke in her, and looks instead for her bag. When she finds it and lifts it from where she'd blindly dropped it, she slings it over her shoulder, smiles, and begins the final steps to extracting herself. "I gotta go."

"So, just like that?" he puts it to her. "Outta here?"

Angela edges around him, positioning herself into his doorway as he shifts round to keep facing her as she backtracks herself out of his world. Angela bites her lips before she looks him in the eye – he's closer now, and his body still glistens from his shower, and she steadies herself before she looks at him, "It's time." She keeps it light, she keeps it friendly, this isn't a break up, it's not even a blow off, it's the close of a momentary occurrence of time travel.

Jordan too is keeping it light, but he isn't letting her off that easily, "To whut? Disappear?"

"'Disappear'? " she offers to throw back at him, in case he's in need of reminders of his own past behavior, but Jordan lets it bounce off him; he isn't easy to be made to feel guilty.

Though there's likely some feeling behind it, he plays it down because he's good and practiced at not letting things get at him, or give him away, and he speaks like everything he says is one more line in a lifelong joke, or a never fading flirtation; banter – short-winded though it may be – is his comfort zone. "Not ready tuh let you go."

Angela's head tilts to one side, and her too-adult eyes blink softly at him, and then she raises her face to kiss his lips. She'd intended a brief kiss, a friendly dispassionate parting, but he has nothing but disdain for her mature handling of their liaison and he grips her to him, backing her into the door jam, letting his hands and lips traverse her as freely as they did in the darkness, wanting to muss her up in some way to leave some impression of himself upon her – to not let her slip away so wholly unaffected by him. Time was, he remembers, she could hardly stand upright in his presence. He can remember nothing but gibberish coming from her lips when he was in earshot, and how her bare girlish thighs used to quake at the magnitude of just being in touching distance of his own near body. He remembers. He used to get lost in it, in her — the sensation of being so wanted, and so desired, so (even) looked up to.  _H_ _im_. It had been everything. He'd never had anything close to it in his life to that point.  _Being loved_? That had been all her. She'd been ballsy about it too – persistent; no matter how badly he behaved or how callously he acted she'd been there, loving him, in a real way, in a grounded, not-just-for-a-week kind of way, and it'd changed things. For him something in him changed because of her. To his chagrin, at seventeen he let her in, and he never fully got her out. He doesn't want to. Angela loved him when he'd had no family around, or inclined to do it. She's his family, as much as Tino is, as much as Shane, much more than any blood relative. She's what he has to come home to. And over the years he's watched her pull away, felt her easing away at times when he wasn't already out the door, head somewhere else entirely, but  _now_  – it's not the same as those other times. Though so much between them is exactly as it ever was – nothing dampened, nothing diminished – there is  _something_  that's changed. He didn't see it last night. Maybe it hadn't been there, maybe he had been blind to it, maybe she had hidden it, but there is a distance, no matter that his mouth is opened wide and hungrily on hers.

In his grasp Angela does not resist the kiss, she accepts it even, and returns it with skill, but the passion is notably absent, and even as he kisses her he asks himself:  _Was I away too long?_  When his passion lessens she retracts herself, then reshoulders her bag from where it'd slipped down her arm. "It was good—" she swallows, "to see you."

Pressing together his moistly kissed lips, Jordan crosses his arms; he sees she's wanting to leave him, to walk away with all of this and  _them_  behind her, and he will not hold on too tightly. But he will ask her to stay. For now. If it can't be long term, and she seems irrevocably convinced that it can't be, then it can't be this quick.  _Not just one night._  Jordan stands over her, studying the girl – the woman – he's walked away from so many times; he blinks, and his head nods. "Come to the show."

Angela moves past him into the hallway and through the little living room, making for the front door. Jordan reaches for a t-shirt and tugs it on as he follows after her.

"Angela—" he pushes his wet hair back. "Hold up." She stops, and she waits. "Don't go. Come to the show tonight." He looks her in the eyes, assessing any traction he's getting with her. "Jus', show up. You know where."

Angela's hand stops on the door handle, and she pauses to look at him, "Jordan—" She isn't blinking as she speaks to him; she's no longer a person who fawns over him, and though that was who she was when he'd first come to love her, he doesn't regret the loss of it. The way she looks at him now – unmitigated and free of illusions – is sharp-pointed, and keeps him on edge. He's come to enjoy it. It's electrifying; no one holds him to any kind of standard the way she does. He'll never be in others' eyes what he can be in hers, and he doesn't mind the fixed look she's giving him, nor mourn her girlish innocence. "—I'm not the girl standing on the sidelines of the Jordan Catalano Show anymore." She means by this to tell him she's not a kid, and she's not his fan, both things he already knows. She can't see that part of him though. He knows she can't. Too many times she'd tried to see him grow up, mature, take on responsibilities beyond himself, and one way or another he's always let her down, and now, though she's looking at him fondly, those let-downs are all she sees. He understands she's unable to see what it is he really sees in her when he looks honestly at her, and that look of perennial affection for him is given from some removal. Angela watches for him to listen to her— "I'm just not."

If she was expecting some kind of reaction from him, she doesn't get one. He's listening, and he's seeing her, and all he does is shrug. And it doesn't disappoint her. If anything it mollifies her – she wasn't wrong about him. She hasn't been for some time. But he does not let it rest there.

"Come to sound check." The knob twists in her hand. "Come," he says again flatly. "Have a drink. Have a couple." Jordan looks at her, and shrugs, "You c'n tell us if we suck," and here his brows duck boyishly over his too-blue eyes, "if you want to." His flirting is shameless.

Angela looks at him, and her mouth opens to speak, but whatever she meant to say does not come. Somehow, there in his bare feet, hardly dressed, chasing after her after having already had her, his charm is winning out. Angela does not speak, instead she sighs, and her absence of a reply opens the space for one more appeal from him.

"Can't be over this fast, Chase."

She opens the door, somewhat wearily, "Jordan," she looks at him straight on, "I'm seeing someone."

Again he isn't fazed. Whether he should be, he isn't, and if that should bother her, it doesn't. "So," is all he says. "See  _me_ today." She sighs again and her eyes roll. "Com'on," and he presses rakishly at his one point of advantage, "ya saw me l _a_ st night."

Angela turns her face away from his. "Shut up."

" _Chase_ —" the familiar conviction with which he's said her name draws her eyes back to his – to his face, and its earnestness, and eventually to the shapes made by his lips. "'ve known you since you were fifteen," here he shifts and leans his height over her for effect, "ya think not coming's saying something about you. But it doesn't havfta say anything. You being here— Last night, or," he blinks, looking at her, biting his soft lower lip, his voice dropping several decimals, "or, whenever… doesn't havfta mean anythin' more than what you want. Just—" she watches as he reaches out and hooks his finger in her front belt loop and tugs her waist fractionally closer in his direction "— _come_."

Their eyes flutter. And their breath stops.


	4. Chapter 4

She extricated herself, and took herself home. Angela walked down those grimy apartment stairs, fished her keys from her stylish clutch handbag and drove away from the night, from those choices, from that slip. The night had been an unforeseen time warp and she needed to get out, back to reality, back to her present. Out from under his influence and the desires of her past.

Driving home she rolled her windows all the way down, she kept her radio loud and ever-changing. Keeping herself from listening to a single track all the way through kept her mind from settling too long on the still vivid sensations from her night spent with him, arresting her as she drives. Once behind her own door she shed her clothes, the ones that had been peeled and tugged and shorn off her so fervently by those strong familiar hands. Leaving the pile abandoned on the hardwood of her narrow entranceway, Angela made directly for the bathroom. There, for an extended length of time, mindless and automatic, she showered, letting the past and the nostalgic-fueled illusion wash off her under the steady torrent of steaming hot water. The steam rose around her as habitually and without thought she scrubbed and lathered, suppressing the unwitting replay of the lapse in her two-year resolve.

After, having let the hot water run out over her head, she stood even longer staring at herself in the foggy bathroom mirror. Free from his influence and the trap of those wicked blue eyes and boyish grin, she tried rationally to deconstruct the past twelve hours or so with Jordan Catalano.

 _What was that?_ She could not answer. _Why did she go home with him? Why had she allowed it to go that far? Why hadn't she walked away immediately?_  Because, in the moment, held fast within his gaze and his arms, it hadn't occurred to her. Truthfully, she'd been melded to him in that place, in that moment. There was no possibility of extraction.

She'd longed for him for so long, built so many of her ideas of love and sex and desire around him and the early years they'd spent together, yielding to him was near intrinsic. He'd left her — and though she's left him too — she'd unknowingly waited for him and his return. Waited for his change of heart, for things to shift just slightly enough so that they might be together, and work. It was bigger than her, bigger than her to walk away from.

Eight years from the start of it all, she's horrified to find the same central question still plagues her. Angela's eyes rolled in self-inflicted agony.  _What is it about him? Hasn't anything changed in all this time?_

And the thought struck her, brutally  _… Is she not who she thought she'd grown to be?_

In the absence of answers Angela pushed it all aside and resumed her life where she'd left it when she'd left her place for a low-key night out the evening before: stable, ordered, rational. Healthy. The day passed; she made herself breakfast and a cup of coffee. She went for a run; she took another shower. She read the paper. She answered emails. She called Rickie, but left no message when he didn't pick up. She watered her houseplants; she went to the market; she cleaned out her freezer. She did a lot of things. She did a lot of things she hadn't planned on for the day just to keep herself busy. But even so, in a flash, in a moment, in the middle of any mundane task, he'd come back to her. His touch, his scent, his heat, his mouth, his raspy voice, those eyes – they come back to her so that her breath hilts, and her chest tightens, and her face flushes.  _Jordan—_

She'd walked right into it. After everything between them and all she'd gone through over him, she'd allowed him to pull her back in, and flood her with nostalgia and— _Longing…_

She knows better. Since fifteen she's known better. Jordan's always had a sort of indescribable power over her. Truthfully though, if she allows herself the honesty, it hasn't always been a bad thing… But she'd thought she'd gotten past it.  _How, after all this time, could she not have gotten over it?_

All day she keeps her hands busy, but then it's a little past five and she's pulling a sweatshirt over her faded tee, grabbing her water canteen, and picking up her keys and heading to her car.

Angela shuts her brain off while she drives. If she's in, she's in, she isn't going to agonize over it; and for some reason, she seems to be in. Retracing the drive she'd made just the night before, she finds herself taking him up on the invite to catch some of his sound check. She doesn't know why. Angela has no interest in being the girl on the sidelines — it's too conspicuous for one. She can't be a groupie, she's too old, and has come too far. But she'll hang out, and guesses she's good for a beer or two. And, maybe this time, some actual conversation.

It's close to five when she walks into the empty club. She gives her name at the door — some part of her half surprised he even remembered to leave her name (she wouldn't go so far as to say thrilled, but undeniably it's an improvement upon being the afterthought he seemingly so effortlessly walked away from) — and walks down the narrow black hallway, her sandals gripping to the sticky painted concrete floor as she goes, and edges into the venue. She looks around, Jordan's at the soundboard with the engineer, and up on the three-foot high stage is the rest of the band. She recognizes Shane immediately; the other two, the bassist and the lead guitarist, she thinks she's met, or seen, but if she's ever known their names they're not coming to her now.

Alone, she looks around, and waits for something more to occur to her than waiting. It's less than twenty-four hours since she was last there, but without the people, and the drinks, and the music and the lighting, the place looks underwhelmingly different. The space is just a painted black room with a sticky floor, a small wrap-around balcony, a stage in front and a bar in back, and a band waiting to break through. She's been in countless of these clubs before. From band to band Jordan's had a fair number of sets in local bars and clubs, opening on Sundays, headlining on Wednesdays, never getting much traction beyond a small circle of like-minded local musicheads. Entering through all those back alley service doors with the musicians and their entourage used to give her a bit of a rush, but being on the sidelines wore thin, and the longer she hung around, being remembered to be included just didn't hold up to the promise of really being some place  _with_  him. But here she is again. Not as hopeful, not as rose-tinted, but maybe just as hopeless.

She would give a hello nod to Shane if he looked her way, but he's busy and she'd just as well postpone the moment of telling eye contact when she'll find just how much of their reunion had been shared. Undoubtedly, if Jordan resisted talking, Shane will fill in the blanks himself, which makes her even more loathe to re-up the acquaintance. She takes a seat at the abandoned bar, and tries to look as though she's completely at ease. As easy at it had been to slip into sync with Jordan, it's not as easy to slip into his larger life. Suddenly she's reminded of all the times she's been left to sit and wait and watch and not participate. Angela resists the temptation to pull out her phone for the easy out, knowing, if she pulls her phone out now as a crutch, she'll come back to it over and over again, and it will look like she chose the most absurd place ever to answer emails. She has no reason to be there but listen, and there's no pride in fronting like she has something other to do than that while she's there. Angela waits. On stage the band works with the crew to set up the cables and mics and their assortment of guitars. They tune, and test mics, and joke, and send signals about the levels up to Jordan and the soundboard guy.

The feeling of cold glass, almost wet, touches her arm. Angela looks behind her, "You made it."

She takes the beer. "Looks like."

Jordan's sense of irony sparks, "It kill you?" and his eyes glint when he asks her.

Angela swallows a smile. "Think I'll hold that call till you play."

A chuckle bursts out from him, low and delighted, "Fair e'nough." He clinks his bottle with hers then heads up to the stage.

Angela sips. Slow, spaced-out cold sips give her something to do as she sits, and listens. They're actually not bad. It's kind of a garage metal-rock sound, with a kind of alt-influence. Jordan sings one and a half songs but mostly he plays rhythm guitar and stands back from the front of the stage — part of it, but not of it all, refusing to be the center. Angela recognizes him up there, in a way she hasn't until now. It's him, Jordan Catalano, in his element. Unchanged, unfiltered, Jordan looks more like himself when he's got a guitar in his hands and only that to think about. Unguarded, he forgets himself and just  _is_. The shit his father for years loaded him down with dissipates; all the crap he worries about and gets caught up in, he escapes without knowing. He isn't fronting anything, not trying to run any games, and he's likeable. Truly. Like in the odd moments she catches him in an honest laugh where he could be just twelve years old. Her eyes, when she lets herself look, stay on him.

They play through four songs in full, and rush through bits of two more. When the opening group switches out their gear for their sound check, Jordan's band gives up the stage and assembles at the bar. "Hey, Chase," Shane nods at her, dryly friendly as at best he ever is. "Heard'ya was back around."

"Shane," she smiles with reserve, "how's it going?"

"Not bad. J's not bad off either."  _There's that smarmy look of his._

"Good to hear," she nods a bit awkwardly, then smiles at the other two. "Hey. Angela," she extends her hand in poised introduction.

"Yeah," the bassist nods, "we've met."

"Chris," Jordan makes a quick nod in his direction and makes the briefest of re-introductions for Angela. "Anthony," he nods at the guitarist and singer.

"Nice to meet you." Again Angela smiles.

"'Again'," Chris adds.

Angela fights the compulsion to role her eyes.  _Why are all of his friends always such inaccessible jerks?_  She finds herself entertaining the thought if Jordan's always read as an equivalent jerk to her friends.

"Nice of you to help out with sound." Shane's mocking her, she knows it. Pointing out, in that singular fashion he has, that sitting there by herself, listening to sound check with nothing to do, and no business or pretense for being there, makes her a groupie of the lowest and most pathetic order. He turns from her to the others, forgetting Angela in full, "Food?"

From a small enclosed booth at the balcony level two girls and a couple of guys have descended and joined them at the bar. as part of the group, as people who have arrived with the band. It occurs to Angela, while the others work out timing, walking distance, and food options, that these people, like she, had have arrived with the band and that Jordan could have set her up with these others, only didn't. Instead he'd left her conspicuously on her own.  _Calculated or benign?_ She doesn't know if she's angry, or should be, or humiliated, or doesn't care at all when Jordan leans into her, his lips and warm breath hovering just beyond her ear, "You comin'?" This mixture of an invitation in the form of a proposition, and a command laced with indifference is textbook Catalano; she finds herself walking with them to a taco stand, ordering, and hanging out, happy that, uncharacteristic for her, in her pullover jeans and sandals she's managed to under-dress every other girl in their party.

With Styrofoam platefuls of small tacos and plenty of beers and messily poured cups of salsas, hot and multicolored, spilling onto the sticky veneer tabletops, the band and their guests shout and jostle and gorge themselves as they please. While the others talk and joke around them, Jordan surreptitiously leans into her from the side, his breath once again hot against her ear and neck, setting her skin aflame. "Hey," he gestures offhandedly with taco in hand, "you, uh, should, stick around for the show tonight." Angela says nothing, only glances at him over the beer she sips. "C'mon," he provokes, "we're not all that bad."

Soberly, vexingly unattainable, she lowers the bottle and looks at him, "What're ya called again?"

"Well," he grins dopily, "don't come cuzz'a the name." He eyes her as he takes the bottle from her, though his own is not yet empty. Drinking the appropriated lager he never breaks his eye contact from her, "You know you know what we're called."

She does. Angela nods, and gestures for the return of her beer. "'Behind the Picture'." She'll never know where all these band names come from.

"You should go," he says again, coolly, like the invitation does her more good than him, like he's looking out for her, which upon reflection is often a stance he takes with her.

_How can someone so bad for a person, so successfully present himself as something necessary, and safe?_

Though such impenetrable resistance may play poorly at this point, after his apartment last night, and showing up today, Angela for some reason refuses to allow herself to soften. She takes a large drink, swallows, and looks at him evenly. "Why?"

The grin comes cockily at her, "Because…"

It's…  _she doesn't know what_  … the way he never balks at her dispassion, just takes it in his resilient stride and leans in a little nearer.

"'Because—" her quick eyes take in the others; not one is listening "—I slept with you last night?'" Her conjecture is stoic, but not accusatory.

Mutely, Jordan shakes his head; not for the first time, she's got it wrong. "' _Cuz…_ " he smiles that goofy boyish half-laugh that's been getting him out of tight spots since before puberty, " _it's music_." The pure simplicity makes her waiver. It's easy to forget that he isn't calculating; Jordan never was. He leans in to life and lets it happen. If he invites you to hear some music, it's because he wants you to listen, and to stick close around. For all that he is – both good and bad – he's not big on duplicity. Jordan shrugs, "Ya might like it." He's won her over. "An' 'cuz," he adds with a slanted wisp of a grin, "I might want to give you a chance to sleep with me again tonight." In spite of herself, she laughs. He's always had that kind of timing.

"You're a jerk," she smiles spitefully.

"If you say so." Jordan leans back.

Angela bites into a taco, glancing at him, just briefly, as she does. "What if I told you I have a boyfriend."

"Well," he says, "ya a'lready did say that." He drinks, and takes a large bite off his carnitas taco. Then he looks at her. "Do you want that to be true?" He doesn't know if she's giving him the truth or just pushing him away. Either wouldn't surprise him. _He deserves to be pushed away some, and why shouldn't she have a boyfriend?_

Angela does not answer.

They rejoin the conversations around them, interacting with the band mates and their guests, but he can't stop looking at her.  _She is the same. She is exactly the same_. The same fullness of cheeks, the berry tint of her poised lips. And those eyes, those wise, all-seeing, remarkably wide eyes of hers. " _Stop it_." She mutters to him, bringing the long-necked bottle back to her lips to obscure any expression her face may be generating.

"Stop what?" Jordan drinks, blinking his would-be innocence at her, stifling a chuckle.  _It's so easy to rile her._

" _Stop staring_."

"I'm not." He smiles. She wonders if he knows that even at this age he can make himself sound fourteen – innocent and full of trouble. He's not going to stop looking. She looks incredible. So much like herself, the young girl he'd fallen for, but a woman now, beautiful, and confident, and so lovely — no, _striking_  — beneath that honey warm blonde hair, dark at the roots, framing her face better than any halo would. And those captivating eyes…  _Angela._

"You  _are_."

"You're looking at me." He grins at her.

At this point she has to swallow a smile, the bottle's not enough. "I don't know why." Her eyes avert his; too much of him is not good for her. She does nod though, in the end, consenting she will go. To another music show, to another night starting with Jordan Catalano.


End file.
